Congressional Power - Congressional dissent beyond vietnam

For several years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the most prominent of
these Senate dissenters was Missouri's Stuart Symington, formerly a
Cold Warrior and Harry Truman's secretary of the Air Force.
Symington's break with the past symbolized the altered world of
Congress in the early 1970s. The Missouri senator chaired one of the most
important foreign policy subcommittees in U.S. history, one that launched
inquiries of U.S. commitments in Thailand, Spain, and Laos and helped
produce the 1971 National Commitments Resolution. In 1967 hearings looking
into U.S. foreign arms sales, Symington offered a concrete demonstration
of the link between military aid and foreign policy. In the
1968–1969 battle against the antiballistic missile (ABM), the first
full-fledged congressional challenge to a Cold War weapons system, he
showed that dissenters, who traditionally shied away from slots on the
Armed Services Committee, needed detailed technical knowledge of military
matters if they hoped to prevail in debates on national security policy.
In his inquiry into U.S. agreements with Spain over military bases on the
Iberian Peninsula, he uncovered how overseas bases, frequently obtained
without congressional sanction, brought with them broader diplomatic
requirements. And in the Laotian hearings, he offered a glimpse at how
secrecy could obscure not only national security material but also secret
wars that were occurring without legislative sanction.

In the broadest sense of the term, Symington himself was a transitional
figure. His own transformation from a hard-line anticommunist to a skeptic
of Cold War foreign policy helped him lead the Senate's transition
into a more aggressive body on foreign policy matters. But his most
significant achievement came in pioneering tactics that other liberals
would use even as he himself faded from the ranks of active dissenters.
Indeed, some of the highest-profile executive-legislative battles during
the later Richard Nixon and early Gerald Ford administrations featured
freshman liberals employing devices prominently used by Symington, such as
the efforts of Iowa senators Harold Hughes and John Culver in the early
1970s. Both Hughes and Culver elected to join the Armed Services Committee
rather than the Foreign Relations Committee; both cultivated allies in the
military; and both used the information gleaned from those allies to
undercut their opponents' credibility. Behind all of these efforts
stood perhaps the most important transition point of the post-Vietnam era:
the willingness of Congress to challenge executive supremacy on Department
of Defense matters—on policy, on specific weapons systems, and in
roll-call votes.

Members of Congress were prepared to use these revived powers. Liberals in
the Senate, often using foreign aid riders, expanded on the ideological
alternative they first had outlined in the foreign aid revolt. First, they
charged that policymakers from the Johnson and Nixon administrations had
subordinated traditional American ideals—such as support for
democracy, human rights, and self-determination—to the
anticommunist dictates of the Cold War. Second, they charged that the
national security apparatus associated with the Cold War had given the
military an excessive role in the making of U.S. foreign policy. Finally,
they contended that a democracy required a foreign policy of
openness—and that a foreign policy of openness required a
consistent congressional presence in international affairs.

This dissent produced attacks against U.S. policy toward Latin America,
Asia, and Africa, regions in which, critics contended, a misapplication of
containment principles had produced policies that contradicted the
country's image as a champion of international reform, employed
military solutions to political or social problems, and allied the United
States with ideologically undesirable regimes. For example, after Augusto
Pinochet's military government assumed power in Chile in 1973,
Representative Donald Fraser and Senator Edward Kennedy opened hearings on
Pinochet's human rights abuses. Congress then enacted a series of
measures to gradually end U.S. assistance to the regime. The Turkish
invasion of Cyprus in 1974 provided another opportunity to act, and Thomas
Eagleton pushed through the Senate an amendment cutting off foreign aid to
the Ankara government. Surveying the burst of activity, one European
diplomat concluded, "It isn't just the State Department or
the president anymore. It's Congress now."

But the most important of these congressional efforts concerned U.S.
policy toward Angola, where a small Central Intelligence Agency covert
operation mushroomed in mid-1975. The operation came to the attention of
Iowa senator Dick Clark, who toured Africa in the summer of 1975 and
returned home convinced that respecting Angolan self-determination would
atone for earlier instances in which the anticommunist mindset of the Cold
War had caused the United States to abandon its traditional
anti-imperialist ideals. Concerned about the ramifications of the Ford
administration's actions, he introduced an amendment to the 1976
foreign aid bill to cut off all covert assistance to Angola, thus forcing
a public debate on the policy. In fact, he reasoned, publicity itself
formed an appropriate method of oversight. A foreign aid amendment and the
subsequent congressional debate provided the perfect vehicle. A few months
later, the Senate passed an amendment to the Department of Defense
appropriations bill introduced by John Tunney immediately terminating
covert assistance to the Angolan anticommunists. The two amendments
represented the high point of a congressional revolt against the
anticommunist ethos of the Cold War and executive authority in foreign
policy.